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Concept Art Writing Prompt: A Space Botanist Marooned
In this week’s Concept Art Writing Prompt by Alice Duke, a botanist contemplates her life on an alien planet with only her mutant dog creature for company. What story can you spin about this lady and her far-off thoughts? Each week, we feature an intriguing image that we hope will set your imagination running. If this illustration inspires you, write a story and share it here in the comments. And have fun! Proposals Nicole Ellie was bored with this place. Sure the first few centuries of immortality after she got it were great, all the new technology and every changing culture was always fascinating and never got old for her. But as humanity spread to the stars she had been scared to join in. What if something had happened to her ship and she was left drifting through the void for eternity? Unable to breathe, unable to speak, unable to die forever. So she had stayed on Earth even as the troubles began. War was no threat to her anyways. But the wars had never been this bad and when she woke she was alone in a blasted wasteland. She had walked and looked for others for decades, criss crossing the Earth as it slowly healed from its wounds. After two centuries she gave up, there was no one left. Not on Earth anyways. But surely there were still people out there among the stars. Surely someday they would return home to the planet that they had spawned from. And she would join them among the stars even if it terrified her. She wouldn’t be alone anymore. So she waited as years bled into decades bled into centuries. All trace of humanity’s existence on the planet disappeared but still she waited. That Small Dark Voice Day 103: I’m going to be honest. This isn’t so bad. When the Ventura Ragtime suffered that reactor failure while we were on survey I knew I wasn’t getting home anytime soon. Or at all, since nobody knew we were surveying this planet instead of the one we’d filed papers for. If you want to get away from the Commonwealth, you have to be careful. When Sandoval and Hui got shredded by the creatures on ground level, I thought, “Well, that’s it, I’m going to be some xenofauna’s lunch with nobody to know.” But it turns out they don’t climb trees well. And the basic tools I had with me, well, they can do a lot of work in a short time. Turns out the upper canopy of this forest has a lot of useful stuff. Even a lot of edible stuff—we were worried by the toxicity we were seeing on ground level! Looks like we just needed to go upstairs afterall. The dads and I built a treehouse when I was a kid. I learned a lot and put it to use here. Salvaging the shuttle helped a lot. When I found Riley hiding out down below it made the situation quite a bit better, I’ll say that. Good ol’ Riley. I understand Hui’s insistence on bringing him now. Keeps the brain from squirming, just having someone else here. So here I am, on an alien world, nobody alive knows I’m here, in a treehouse, in the middle of a botanical bonanza with nutritional and biochemical bounty beyond belief. Honestly, I could have planned worse retirements. mekki “Ninety-seven bottles of beers on the wall. Ninety-seven bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall. Now just the ladies!” Josie sighed. This was the twentieth time today she sang the 99 Bottles of Beer Song while lying in bed and staring at the canopy of trees above her. She rolled over and grabbed the tablet off the floor. She tapped it. The screen came to life. No long range internet connection. Same as yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. All the way back to two hundred and fifty days ago. However, the tablet, for some reason she couldn’t understand was still able to receive messages. She made a few taps and the last message from two days ago came to screen. “Ms. Russo, Manny is still loose. We are closing in. Days now. Weeks tops. Hang in there. You can do it. yours, A. Westal” The “a” stood for agent. Her Agent. Her knight in shining three piece suit and mismatched shoes. Though Josie had no idea why Westral signed his letters that way. She guessed that some people could never give up their titles. She re-read the first line of the message. “Manny is still loose.” Manny was the reason why she was here on this green, green, oh, so, green God forsaken planet doubling as a safe house. Josie had been Manny’s friend with benefits from time to time. “Some benefit,” snorted Josie. “Hung like a raisin.” But still Manny had power. Lots of power. He was THE Don of Chicago. He had so many cops, judges and higher ups in his pockets that it was better to wonder who he wasn’t paying off than the latter. Now with that power came the real benefits. Though they weren’t really a couple, with Manny trying to play the role of carefree unattached playboy, he would still shower her with gifts. And she took them. Not every day you get your own jet engraved with your name on the side. In gold. But then one day, Manny went to far. Shot a priest. Josie did not know why but only that priest was one of the good ones. He would be up always at the crack of dawn in front of his church handing out warm breakfasts to all the homeless. Rain. Shine. He was there. He helped run a shelter for abuse women. Josie had known a few of the residents personally. Knew what a fantastic job he was doing with them. The priest always knew what to say and do to put them at ease. Understood when to step back and let the nuns of his parish take over. He was a good, good man. And Manny took a gun, pressed it again the priest’s forehead and, “BAM!” Dead priest. It was not the first time Josie had witness Manny doing something immoral. But it was the first time she had seen him doing such a thing to an innocent. Something snapped in Josie that day and in a blink she found herself standing in an office full of FBI agents. She didn’t know how she got there. Only that once the first person came up to her and asked, “May I help you?” She opened her mouth and never stopped talking. Now, she was on this planet. Not a new city. Not a new country. A whole freakin’ planet. She had never been off world before. Earth was good enough for her. Staring at the canopy, she knew that as a fact. “I’m supposed to be a botanist,” she said out loud to herself. That was her cover. “Dr. Gally Peterson” A new botanist on the planet, doing field research. There were two other doctors with her who knew who she really was and were working along with the Feds. They weren’t too keen on working with Josie. She had struck them as being dim. How the hell were they going to pass her off as a scientist? Luckily, the planet was almost all void of humanoid life. Plenty of plants. The occasional pet brought along for company? Sure. But a city? Hah! You would be lucky to find a hermit. “Hey, dog,” Josie yelled at the animal lying next to her bed. The dog belonged to one of the scientists. Josie couldn’t be bothered to learn the pet’s name. “Are you listening, dog? Because guess what? I am so freakin’ bored. I’m like supposed to be a plant doctor or something but here’s the kicker, I’ve got hayfever. Of all the luck, right?” She looked over at the dog. It had not even bothered to flick a tail in attention. “Meh. What good are you? Man’s best friend. More like Man’s boring friend. Hey, look at me, making funnies.” “Would you shut up?!” Josie sat up. She looked around. Were the other scientists back from their plant gathering trip? There was no one there. “Hello?” Josie yelled. “I said, would you shut up?!” Josie looked down and stared at the dog. “Are you talking? Did you just...talk?” The dog lifted its head and stared at the women for a moment before rolling over and away from her. Josie beamed. “I am hearing things. I’ve gone mad. You know what this means?” She shoved her arms in the air in victory, “I can now rant and rave to anything or anyone with impunity because I’ve gone nuts!” She flickered both middle fingers to the canopy above her. “Fuck you, trees. You heard me you smug green bastards. You think you are big and mighty, given me oxygen but guess what? So do weeds and do you ever see them bragging?” She let out a cackle and fell back into her bed. The quiet came over everything. “I really, really need to get back home,” she sighed as she looked up, “ ...even insanity is boring.” With a deep breath, she began to sing again. “Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-six bottles of beer....” Guild_Navigator 0001101011101110000011001100000110111010111101 “She is dead.It really is a Pre-Integration Unit. 87 % chance of it being from the very first Unscaled Generation.” 00110101111001110111011011001101011100101100010 “But that would mean she must’ve functioned in this jungle planet for at least 400 years before her corporal functions failed. That’s unheard for an unintegrated unit. “ 000011011110111100110000110001110011000001100— “Have the Fielders get rid of the body and prepare the planet for Bio-conjunction. The last of the Un-integrated has been registered and accounted for —” 000000011101011101111101110111100001111001110011011 “Emergency transmission from the Fielders! It was a nano-bomb! She was a nano-bomb all along hidden from the scanners from all the diversity in this jungle planet. It’s a 0000011101110111LIFEFINDSAWAY synthozoic Work Diary,Wednesday, May 22nd, 3107 CSE, Day 33, 17:31, Personal Note To call them plants was to oversimplify. Sure, they were green, sure, they harvested sunlight for energy. Sure they took in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Did you know that all Earth life only used 40 of the over 500 known amino acids? These light harvesters used 20 or so which were completely unknown on Earth. And they didn’t use DNA. They used HNA, anhydrohexitol-nucleic acid, which used an entirely different set of sugars and phosphates from those common to Earthly life. Any life I cooked up and ate here, would either be completely indigestible or, more likely, full of deadly toxins. The ship doc had to keep regenerating and reseeding my microbome otherwise my immune system would be completely shot and I’d die. The doc also had to completely rework any organic matter I took here into a form that I could digest and take nutrition from. At least I didn’t have to worry about parasite infecting me. My body would be toxic to them. But if the doc broke down, I was dead. This is what you get when you retreat in a hurry. The N Confederal Contract, fragmented from the Union seventy years ago, taking more than 10,000 rich systems with it. Twenty years ago, they felt strong enough to declare war. It’s been a rapid and disorganized retreat ever since then. I wasn’t biologist or, more accurately, I didn’t have a chance to complete my degree before the draft board called the even numbers up on Mystery Three. We were supposed to reinforce Union border fleets in the direction of the Sagittarius Arm, which were badly outnumbered and primitive. Our squadron was set to join the current squadron defending Banana Double Prime. It ended very badly. My boat crash landed not 325 klicks from where I’m writing this now. A month has passed, I built a shelter and even planted some cute light harvesters in my flak helmet. Now I’m dithering whether to launch a rescue beacon and risk being captured as a POW. The status of the ship doc weighs heavy on my mind. LaruaDragonWench It had been three years since the last transmission from Earth. Three long years. Tawna shifted on her mattress, the boilwood frame she made to support it and keep it off the ground squeaking with every move. Once again the humidity on Avalon-5 was debilitating. Growing up in Florida should’ve prepared her for the near 100% moisture saturation she suffered through during the rainy season—which took up most of the year—but she still felt weighed down by it, by the sensation of sucking air through a wet washcloth. Maybe because she was reminded every day, in every way, that this wasn’t Florida, that this was a freaking alien planet, something Tawna still had to pinch herself over every now and then. She turned, her hair making a rasping sound against the rough material of her pillow, and looked over at her “dog,” Sparky. She laughed softly at the absurdity of the name, the first one that came to mind when it decided to come live with her in her treetop observation station. Sparky raised its head and look at her. “What are you laughing at?” Of course, Sparky didn’t actually say that as its species couldn’t verbalize. But the alien spore that had infected her the day Sparky took her to meet other members of its clan had done something to her. It allowed her to read the chromatophores that infused the skin of these canibians—her own, informal name for these strange dog-like creatures that shared so many features of frogs and salamanders. And right now, those chromatophores communicated Sparky’s curiosity tinged with confusion. “Nothing, just random thoughts.” Her skin flashed with the appropriate colors and patterns, a second gift from the spore. A spore that to every scan and test performed on Avalon-5 by autonomous scientific probes before Tawna ever set foot on the planet’s surface had been deemed innocuous and safe for human exposure. Something she made sure to emphasize in her last report. The last one to receive any response from home: “Report received. Instructions to follow.” But no instructions came. For three long years. Plenty of time for her to wonder if she would ever be allowed back home. Or if Earth could still be considered home. And then she heard the sonic boom of the spaceship arcing across the jade green sky . . . DeapGreanDream “I’ve tried everything...” Liza said in sedated frustration to her companion. She spoke to her canine hybrid Mog all the time. She knew he listened, understood her every word, he just couldn’t answer. Much like the trees were able to hear her and understand. There was the one unknown variable hindering the next step in communication between them. “They can speak. I have heard them. In whispers. Without help from the wind, the trees spoke. The want to say their piece. And to sing the music of forest hymns. Not just to me, but to all the world.” Lying on her back, Liza up at sunbeams cut through leaves of summer trees, the heat of the stream taunts her. A failure which ostracized her from community and family alike. “Leave it be,” She’s been told. “They will talk if and when they are ready.” But when will that be? She doesn’t want to wait for that day. Especially, after knowing what she’s heard. Lying on the bed, listening to the rustle of branch and leafs, it came to her. The flute? Where is it? Mog was startled from his nap as she stepped over him to search the tree house for the instrument. Over turning every thing not too heavy, she finally remembered where to look. Under the bed. Her heart thumped hard against her chest. She put it to her lips and played. The song was one of her favorites. A languid number that touched the part where longing lived. She played it for hours in the hope that They will sing it back to her. Or at least, whisper approval. WiessCrack My thesis needed just a little bit Of up-close research, my advisor said. The way he looked at me when he said it Led me to drop out and come here instead. I’ve found about a hundred species here That don’t show up in any of my texts. But when I skipped my flight out, it was clear I’d formulated no plan for what’s next. “Spot” keeps me safe at night, there’s food galore, The climate’s mild, and I have all I need— But still, dissatisfied I search for more And see myself in every fallen seed That dreams itself to be a mighty tree: My education hasn’t taught me to be me. X97.9XXS The communicator chimed gently Eatarre opened her eyes and looked up at the sun-dappled green canopy Another chime She swung her legs off the herb-filled mattress and sat up. Picking up her communicator, she scowled as she read the message ident “Damn it, Spruance,” she snarled. “You would think the someone could make a decision on sher own.” “Remember, Serenity, it has been one hundred T-years,” broadcasted her mu-mastiff. “I know, old friend, but you would think that the Twenty Universes could get along without me for a couple of centuries.”